“Sidewalk Stories” at Film Forum This Sunday!

New York Readers of Travalanche, I bring you Glad Tidings!

This Sunday at 11am, the Film Forum (Jr) will be showing Charles Lane’s wonderful 1989 film Sidewalk Stories, and Mr. Lane will be there in person. I’m assuming its timed for Black History Month and I can’t think of anyone better to inspire children of color who might want to be film-makers someday (though I have little doubt he’d have sobering words of caution as well. He won prizes at Cannes and elsewhere for this film, and also directed a major film for Disney and it manifestly did NOT result in a blank check and an assured career as it might have for a white, male director of his promise. It’s been decades since Lane’s last movie). Still, a cinema hero. I mentioned him in Chain of Fools as “the first black silent comedy star”, and while that has a dramatic resonance, I’d forgotten, or perhaps didn’t know yet, that Bert Williams had made a few films). Anyway, I’d sing you the praises of Sidewalk Stories here, if I hadn’t already done it elsewhere: read my tribute to Sidewalk Stories from when it screened at Tribeca Film Festival a few yearsago here at amny.

And tickets and info about Sunday’s screening at Film Forum Jr are here.